Exploring technology to deliver training

It’s nothing new, the Community Resource Centre (CRC) network has been set up for many years with the technology to link regional and remote areas of Western Australia, thanks to Royalties for Regions funding. However as a community we don’t tend to utilise the facilities at our doorstep.

Many of us who organise ‘extension events’ and training complain when only a handful of people turn up to an event we have spent time and money on. Understandably there is so much demand on people’s time that everyone has to be very cautious about what they attend. Travel time and distance is becoming more and more of a limiting factor.

Photo by Andrea Salmond of Katanning Landcare

On Monday September 1st the Katanning Landcare Centre hosted a ‘How Dirt Works’ workshop with Deb Archdeacon. As this topic has come up as one of interest to many Landcare and NRM professionals throughout the South West NRM region it was time to explore how we could deliver this more efficiently.

Gerry Murphy of BeingThere (http://www.beingthere.com.au/), who works closely with the WA CRC network, worked with and set up four locations for the ‘How Dirt Works’ workshop to be broadcast to. As a result, not only the people present at Katanning could participate, but the session was broadcast live to Bunbury DAFWA and Boyup Brook and Bridgetown CRCs. Having seen how successful this can be, potentially future sessions could include more locations with the number of participants only limited by the size of the venues.

“It was so much easier than I first thought, but we couldn’t have organised it without the professional assistance of BeingThere who really understand how the technology works, who to talk to, and the right things to ask,” said Andrea Salmond, Katanning District Landcare Officer.

“Now that we’ve seen it in action, I am inspired to try to use the technology more frequently for a number of reasons, and test out slide sharing and other features we hadn’t explored in this first session.

“The potential to run remote sessions more often means that we can more easily connect and share with our peers, without the need for long distance travel. This could greatly enhance our ability to access education sessions, in particular, across the state and even nationally, as well as give us the opportunity to increase our profile through sharing our video recordings online.”

Article republished with the permission of South West Catchments Council (SWCC) – Author Andrea Salmond.

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